"Linux has an abundance of excellent terminal applications. Interestingly, I could not find any decent comparison of their text display performance. Since I use the command line a lot, I want text output that is as fast as possible. When you compile a large project, you don't want the console output to be the limiting factor. I took the burden on me to do a comprehensive comparison of the text through of all possible terminals."

Strange this should be published now. I was just conducting similar tests trying to find the best terminal last weekend.

In my experience, he's right; gnome-terminal is FAST, unless you have xcompmgr or compiz running. Then it gets very slow and uses up massive amounts of CPU time (X eats up to 100% of one of my CPUs.) But, if I run rxvt, or one of it's descendants, with the compositing window manager on, it's much faster than gnome-terminal.

As soon as I kill the compositor, the performance flips, and gnome-terminal is the winner.

Does anybody have a guess as to why? Only gnome-terminal gives me problems with the compositor, Xterm, rxvt, etc. don't seem to be affected.